4 ms·

I absolutely love the rationale for the name of the effect.

• jhbadger 5y ago
  Although it does have the slight downside that Gell-Mann in his later years started promoting nonsense in the field of linguistics to the effect that all human languages supposedly descended from one (it's a common failing among great scientists; compare Pauling's unfortunate trend towards "Vitamin C cures cancer!" in his later years)
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  Actually that's the reason I posted this when I saw that gem at the bottom of his blog. Naming is clearly a form of branding. Why Michael Crichton called it the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: By the way, why is the effect named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann? Crichton explained I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have. - It reminds me of why von Neumann told Shannon to call it entropy: When Shannon first derived his famous formula for information, he asked von Neumann what he should call it and von Neumann replied “You should call it entropy for two reasons: first because that is what the formula is in statistical mechanises but second and more important, as nobody knows what entropy is, whenever you use the term you will always be at an advantage! http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/what-von-neumann-said-to-shannon/ http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/what-von-neumann-said-to-s...